The New Mathways Project in Texas

The Dana Center received national attention when it announced its innovative joint enterprise with the Texas Association of Community Colleges to develop the NMP and implement it statewide in Texas. The enterprise brings together Texas’s 50 independent community colleges—all of which are represented by TACC—with the Dana Center.

TACC has made the NMP a central part of its ambitious Texas Success initiative. Through this joint enterprise, we will implement significant reforms across Texas — a large and diverse state — and work through all levels of the system, from the classroom to the halls of state policymakers.

Guiding Principles

The Texas community colleges are committed to reform based on the four guiding principles below. The Dana Center’s role is to build the tools and services that colleges will need to fulfill that commitment.

Implementing the NMP is a major reform effort requiring collaboration among faculty, staff, and administrators within and across institutions. We continue to build and implement structures that support working at scale from the project’s beginning.

The NMP Mentorship Program is designed to fast-track effective practices from codevelopment colleges to active-learning sites. In this program, codevelopment and active-learning sites are paired up to share information coming in from the codevelopment colleges, active-learning sites, and the Texas Association of Community Colleges.

The Transfer Champions Initiative coordinates collaboration between the codevelopment colleges and four-year institutions to address issues such as course transfer and the applicability of courses to majors. The initiative is also designed to enable more institutions of higher education to enact the NMP model’s four principles.

“Clearly the 50 community colleges in Texas recognize the need to change developmental math education, and the New Mathways Project is a long-term commitment on our part to make students and Texas more successful.”

—Dr. Richard Carpenter, chancellor of the Lone Star College System and TACC chair-elect, May 9, 2012